A Name of Her Own

She was christened Lizzie Maybelle at birth in Ada, Oklahoma on August 22, 1907. She hated that name and was proud to tell me at many points when I was growing up how she had come to claim her own identity. She hated the name Lizzie Maybelle and felt it reflected someone that was not her. It was a silly name, she thought. Nothing like what she felt she truly was. As an adult, she went by another name entirely, similar, but more like herself.

She was relieved when the courthouse holding her birth certificate burned down, requiring her to reproduce her birth certificate. Ever after she went by the more mature sounding name and identity of Elizabeth Mabel. She wanted an identity that reflected who she was.

I sometimes think about how she changed her name and her identity in the early 1900’s to reflect herself and who she felt she was. It is weird to think that one of our country’s major cultural disputes now, over 100 years later, is whether a young person should be able to change a name and identity to something reflecting more closely who and what that person is. It seems we were better off in many ways when people just changed their identities and people just moved on.

Growing up in Oklahoma in the early 1900’s was hard. One of her strongest memories was of nearly drowning when crossing a river in a wagon. From her telling, the river was rising and its current increasing rapidly. By the time the wagon got to the middle of the river, it was floating in the water. The horses lost their footing, and the wagon overturned. She fell into the river, nearly drowning. She remembered the horses screaming, people yelling her name and choking in the water.

It was a traumatic experience that stuck with her the rest of her life and her favorite story whenever I asked her what it was like growing up in rural Oklahoma. She was never a huge fan of water after that. Sadly for my mom, it was one of the reasons that she never got to spend a lot of time in the water and learning how to swim until she grew up and had “fish” for children.

My Grandma Baker only had about six years of formal schooling and got married to my grandfather at the age of 16. Although neither had much education, they pressed all four of their living children to complete a college degree to be able to support themselves as professionals. They both valued education deeply.

She was tough. She and my Grandpa had suffered a rough early life, losing both a farm to fire and a child during the Great Depression. My mother once told me that Grandma was working hard in the corn fields when she went into an early labor where the baby that would have been an aunt or an uncle to me was born and died. My father, rather incorrectly, always said that one reason he was attracted to my mom and married her was because he thought she would be quiet and meek like her mother. He got two things wrong in that assessment—his vision of both who my mother and my grandmother were. He didn’t realize that quietness quite often doesn’t mean meekness, but in fact a great depth of thought and emotion.

Due to the hard life in Oklahoma, my grandparents migrated first to Chicago, where my mom was born, and then later to California. They were one of the many “Okies” and other migrants who became part of the great move west that helped to turn California into the modern economic miracle it is today. At around the same period, my mother’s current husband’s family moved from Mexico to run a farm in California’s Central Valley. They also were part of the effort that turned that part of the state into the so called “breadbasket of the western hemisphere.” California and its wealth were built on both the internal and external migrants. It is a part of who all of we Californians are.

My mother is the youngest and was born when her parents were at what was considered to be the very old ages of 40 and 38. Her mother was very ill when my mom was born and spent the first few weeks in the hospital, while the baby was pampered by her father and older siblings at home. My mother never lived in the same house with her oldest brother, who was 20 years her senior, while her sister was pretty much an adult when she arrived. Both women told me that my 18-year-old aunt was afraid to hold her baby sister in public in 1945, because nearly everyone assumed my mom was her war baby. That was very embarrassing for my aunt.

The Great Depression was indelibly etched in everything Grandma Baker did. She kept every little item that entered the house. I remember balls of twine and rubber bands and containers filled with bread wrapper ties. Drawers and drawers were filled with little objects that might be useful in the future. She lived frugally in an old house and rarely purchased anything for herself. The big outing was her and my grandfather’s weekly trip to an “All-You-Can-Eat” restaurant in nearby Santa Rosa and Napa, where they enjoyed feasting on fried chicken, potatoes and salads. As a child visiting them, it was the height of elegance to go to a buffet restaurant and eat all you wanted, especially the ice cream for dessert.

In college I had the assignment of asking an older person what the most life-changing events in their lifetime were. I asked my grandmother that question. I was wondering if she would say the automobile, the telephone, the landing on the moon or some other technological achievement. She told me that the best thing that happened in her lifetime was the invention of and availability of penicillin.

Before that time, so many people, especially children, died or had terrible illnesses from infections that could be easily treated when antibiotics were easily available. She remembered her oldest children having terrible illnesses and being so sick that she was afraid they would die. Raising children was a life lived on the edge of fear and loss in those days. When my mother was young, my grandmother was relieved that she could take her to the doctor and be sure she would survive.

She told me that she loved going to work outside the home. The best thing about that she said was having something of her own, independent from her husband. She had money to buy herself whatever she liked. I very recently found out that one of the things that made my mother’s life bearable when I was a small child was that my grandmother sent her money for special things, including replacing pianos every time my dad moved and made my mom get rid of her things.

Having her own money made my grandmother feel that she had some control over her life, an identity of her own, separate from her life as wife and mother. She worked in a variety of places, including some factory work, but during my mother’s childhood and until retirement she worked in the nearby hospital cafeteria. My mother was an early latch key child, and both resented and enjoyed coming home from school to an empty house.

Though she was incredibly frugal with her funds her entire life, as was typical of those who survived the Great Depression, she enjoyed having her own money to spend on occasion. I remember how happily she went through her change collection to give her grandchildren some coins to go buy some candy. Her entire face lit up with happiness and being able to provide that gift without asking anyone else.

She began to go blind when my mother was a teenager. By the time I came around, she could see less and less all the time. While she had been a beautiful knitter of sweaters and crocheter of many lace items, by the time I was seven or so, she was no longer able to do these crafts because of her worsening vision.

When we moved back to California in early 1974, she told me that all she could see was light and people’s figures as a shadow in front of the light. By that time, they had lived in their home on Howell Mountain in Napa County, Northern California for so long that she easily maneuvered around the house. She was so comfortable with her surroundings that I sometimes forgot that she couldn’t see. I remember clearly sitting with her and my grandfather, watching Lawrence Welk or Liberace on the television. She would remind me to describe what was happening, so that she could see things through my words.

She was a fairly quiet woman who enjoyed sitting quietly and talking or making a lemonade from their tree. She enjoyed music and understood it very well. As I was learning to play the piano, she was the one who noticed when it was off tempo or a false note was played. Although a quiet woman, she had a strong will and stood up to my grandfather when she believed he was wrong.

One summer I was staying with them, and the temperatures were hot—over 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the day. They did not have an air conditioner, and my grandfather refused to even turn the fans on high to avoid any cost in electricity. Though she was as frugal as he, she drew the line there. I remember them getting into a heated argument (in more ways than one) about whether or not he should leave the fan on high all day. She told him firmly that her granddaughter didn’t need to go through the misery they had.

After my grandfather died, she moved into a group home where her social life increased. She enjoyed several years of friendships, group outings and activities. Being a social butterfly had never been available to her as an option before, and I got the feeling that she thoroughly enjoyed a life with few responsibilities.

When she died on December 5, 1988 in Saint Helena, she had a quiet funeral and was buried next to my grandfather, where she had spent most of her life. She was a typical woman of her age—gentle and kind but yet not overly demonstrative, strong and hardworking, and always a bulwark. It was a life that spanned such a changed world.

There were so many new technologies and ways of living in the 1900’s, and she experienced most of them with an amazing amount of calmness and grace. With all of those changes from rural life in the early 1900’s until now, one thing has remained the same—a young person needs to claim and be who they really are. She set a great example for the upcoming generation. She knew who she was and acted on that knowledge.